Category: Ealing and Northfield

Today the Telegraph has gone big on rubbish with a front page headline, a comment piece from Charles Glover and the whole of page 4 devoted to two-weekly collections and other bin stuff. They point out that Gordon Brown’s landfill tax went up from £21 to £24 this month and that it will go up £8 per tonne every year for the next three years. This might be defensible as a green measure but the rate of change is likely to have very damaging consequences for local authorities. It is yet another way that Gordon Brown is burdening local council tax payers to keep cash at the centre to fund his own priorities.

You can see from the graph what damage this is going to do to local government finance. On a slightly geeky note I do wish journalists would learn the difference between a metric Tonne and an Imperial ton. I guess they all do English and skimp on their maths and physics.

Ealing gets a small piece of its own. The slightly dubious headline is “Cameras ‘could spy on your waste'”. I guess “Cameras ‘could spy on your waste but will in fact be used to catch people making a mess of the place'” doesn’t have the same ring. The actual article is very accurate and ends with:

Ealing has decided not to move to fortnightly collections after consulting residents.

Both today and yesterday Associated Newspapers, who publish both the Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard, have been trying to make a story out of Ealing Council’s envirocrime activity. They obviously have a bit of a thing about this term which is really about cleaning up the neighbourhood as anyone who follows this blog knows – click on the Ealing envirocrime category right for background.

Yesterday the Mail on Sunday published this story with the headline “‘Envirocrime’ snoops paid £30,000 just to check your rubbish”. Their angle seems to be we are being wasteful and paying these “snoops” too much. Like much of the Associated Newspapers output this is rubbish. The MoS takes the £142K budget for expanding this service (see press release, dated 6th February) and divides by 4 to give some indication of what these officers are paid. Only this number includes what we call “on costs”, ie employer’s NI, pensions, heat and light, office rent, you name it. In any case we need pretty sophisticated people for these roles as they work pretty much on their own in a ward meeting the public and businesses and helping to clean the place up, for instance by ensuring that businesses handle their rubbish properly, derelict land is cleared, street cleaning is done properly, graffiti is cleaned, plus a whole long list of other jobs. Also these people are going to be working in London where the cost of living is very high.

Today the Standard carries a shorter version with the headline “‘Bin bag police’ to target the rubbish rebels”. The Standard knows full well that the envirocrime team does not persecute hapless residents putting out their rubbish. The team chase people who repeatedly mess the place up but that is not the story that the Standard wants to print so they are happy to print rubbish. So-called journalist Alex Stephens is the latest rubbish journalist from the Standard to cover this story. His skill set clearly encompasses cutting down yesterday’s news story to fill a blank space.

I can’t imagine what the Mail on Sunday told Isitfair’s Christine Milsom to make her say this:

They are being heavy-handed. We are living in a world where everything we do is watched and regulated. George Orwell has arrived. If you go to work early it is difficult to get it right with the rubbish.

If I were her I would feel that I had been manipulated into giving a quotable quote by the MoS. Nasty people.

You might wonder why we keep getting flyposted by Bar 38 in Hammersmith (see photo taken yesterday of two Bar 38 posters taken yesterday at junction of South Ealing Road and Little Ealing Lane).

Private equity shops drive their businesses hard to make cash – why not? I have no problem with that until they think it is OK to mess our neighbourhood with flyposting to pull in the punters.

I visited Bar 38 twice in February to complain about this and again yesterday. I have taken down the posters and sent the photo to our envirocrime officer.

The Bar 38 chain of bars is currently part of the Tattershall Castle Group.

They in turn are owned by well-known private equity shop Alchemy Partners led by Jon Moulton pictured right. I have written to Moulton to ask him to stop this.

Here is my response to Ellen Widdup’s e-mail.

Widdup reckons that:

• I have implied she cannot do her job.
• I have questioned her professionalism.
• I have slated her abilities as a reporter.

She is right although maybe I would say she hasn’t done a very good job rather than she cannot do it! I called her story “ridiculous”. I reported that one of her statements was “utter garbage”. I questioned the standard of journalism and fact checking by all papers that covered the story. I referred to Widdup as a “so-called journalist”.

I am entitled to call her story ridiculous because it is very far from the truth as I shall demonstrate.

In her story she claimed: “Cameras will be installed around the borough before the change in collections from weekly to fortnightly.” In Ealing we had 10,274 people go to the trouble to complete a consultation questionnaire which asked people about 2 weekly collections. The response was so negative that on 12th February the council issued a press release that quoted council leader Jason Stacey as saying:

It is essential that when you run consultations that you listen to what people tell you. As a result, I am happy to confirm here that there will be no move to a fortnightly collection and we will add plastics to our household recycling service later in the year.

Widdup’s statement was utter garbage and she could have got her facts straight with a cursory look at recent Ealing press releases.

The germ of this story was the following quote from last month’s Around Ealing:

To catch vandals and envirocriminals, cameras disguised as anything from tin cans to house bricks will instantly email images to the council’s CCTV control centre.

The quote came from an article on page 9 that dealt exclusively with crime. To link this with domestic waste collection is to simply defy the truth.

The following statements from the Standard article were just plain wrong:

“Council war on residents who put out rubbish on wrong day”

“A London council is to use hidden cameras to catch residents who leave rubbish out on wrong day.”

The article mis-represents envirocriminals defining them as “those who leave out black bags when they should not or allow the contents of their bins to spill out on the pavement.”

Widdup was clearly impatient with the Ealing comms people last week. I am told that she was given a statement by them that stuck to the facts. These facts did not make much of a story so she kept chipping away in the hope that she could magic one out of thin air. Apparently she feels that Ealing Council is obliged to meet her deadlines and that if it tries to scotch her story by keeping schtumm then she is exonerated from her responsibility to check facts. She is not.

Widdup confirms that she did not talk to Will Brooks, portfolio holder for Environment and Transport. It is funny how she was able to quote him as saying: “anyone who broke the rules on collection would be considered to be a fly-tipper”. As far as I am aware Councillor Brooks has never said or written any such thing. Indeed he called the Standard’s news editor to clarify this so-called quote and they refused to take his call. Brooks has e-mailed the Standard twice and failed to get a response. I challenge the Standard to explain the provenance of this quote.

Widdup shows her ignorance of modern local government by misnaming Ealing’s Transport and Environment Scrutiny Panel a committee. If she had picked up on this subtle distinction she might have noticed that Councillor Vivendra Sharma is an opposition councillor and so perhaps not best placed to be a source for the purposes of fact checking. She claims that Sharma corroborated her story. In fact his quote does not. It is clear that he is merely commenting on the story that he has been given. He is quoted as saying:

I predict a lot of complaints about this method of catching litter louts. It is possible that many will question the motives of using CCTV and feel it is an infringement of privacy. Everyone realises that fly-tipping is an issue which needs dealing with and that putting your rubbish out early or leaving bags split open can encourage a rat problem, but I think there may be better ways of approaching it.

Judge for yourself.

Before I sign off I will just give Widdup a short lesson in defamation. Slander usually refers to a verbal defamation and libel is refers to written defamation. Nothing is defamation if it is true unless the facts are organised to give a misleading impression. I stand by what I say. It is true.

You may remember that Evening Standard journalist Ellen Widdup is the one that managed to get a front page byline with her “Spy cameras in tins of beans” story last Tuesday (see previous posting). Now she has written to me asking me to delete that posting.

Fat chance.

When I got her e-mail yesterday the immortal words of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones sprang to mind. The second and penultimate paragraphs are very funny. The middle three are the rambling self-justification. Here is what she said:

I am writing to you regarding to your blog entry (posted below):

The reason for my correspondance (sic) is that I resent your implication that I cannot do my job and the slur on my professionalism. Clearly you are entitled to voice your opionion (sic) on the content of the Evening Standard article but I do not believe this should extend to slating my abilities as a reporter.

You do not know the background to how I came across this story so perhaps it would be an idea to fill you in so you can make a more educated comment on the content of the piece. The story was originally in the Mail on Sunday (prior to its appearance in the Standard) and the paper quoted directly from your own council magazine which read “To catch vandals and envirocriminals, cameras disguised as anything from tin cans to house bricks will instantly email images to the council’s CCTV control centre.” It also said that a council spokeswoman (from your press office at Ealing) had confirmed that “envirocriminal” extended to people who fail to put their bin out on the right day.

I needed to confirm the facts of this story before we ran anything so I telephoned your press office and spoke to an officer* about the content of the Mail on Sunday piece and asked for clarification on the word “envirocriminal” and for more information on what the council had proposed. She said she would get back to me. I then called her on another two ocassions (sic) and each time she failed to respond to my questions or meet my deadlines.

I was therefore forced to find an alternative method of confirming or denying the substance of the Mail on Sunday article. I tried to call Will Brooks but there was no response so I went through the list of councillors sitting on the Transport and Environment Committee until one of them answered my phone calls. That happened to be Virenda (sic) Sharma. Mr Sharma confirmed the story was true and gave me all the background information I needed to write the story. I had no reason to doubt that what he was telling me was true. I may also point out at this point that, at no stage, has Mr Sharma, complained that he has been misquoted or denied what he told me on that day. With this knowledge, I hope you can no[w] (sic) vent your anger elsewhere. Perhaps you would like to criticise your own incompetant (sic) press office who fail to respond to press queries of an urgent nature? Or perhaps you should speak to Mr Sharma because clearly he has a different understanding of the meeting than you do?

Either way I ask you to remove this entry to your blog immediately. It constitutes a slanderous attack on my abilities as a reporter and if it is not removed, you will be hearing from my lawyers.

Please confirm you have received this email. I look forward to hearing from you.

I will be taking her statements apart later but I thought that some of the people who wasted a lot of time last week trying to damp down her inaccurate and silly story might enjoy her making a fool of herself. More later.

*Note I edited out the name of an officer here as I don’t want to involve one of Ealing’s employees in my spat with a journalist.